B2B Lead Generation Trends: What are the top B2B lead generation trends to watch for in 2011?

In 2011, B2B Marketers will improve their ability to generate leads by:

1. Perfecting the combination of free and gated content offers. Use free to build credibility and trust. Gate the bigger pieces that entice prospects to pay with their contact information because they already know they'll get value from the exchange based on past experiences.

2. Simplifying offer forms. B2B marketers will finally stop using forms with fields they don't need at that moment. Every field added to a form increases the friction with a prospect and changes their focus from gaining access to the content to gauging the trade off value in relation to the effort required to do so. The majority of prospects are likely to perceive the effort as too much, too pushy and not worth it.

3. Addressing B2B content to segments using personas for foundation. The more closely your content aligns your ideas with targeted prospect perspectives, the more likely they are to opt in to learn more. General content is too broad to be useful and, once again, requires too much effort for prospects to fit your scenarios to their specific situations.

4. Integrating inbound and outbound marketing. This means being findable when your prospects go looking and creating consistent and continuous offers designed to keep them engaged over time -- whether they come looking or your content goes out to reach them. With a content strategy in place, inbound and outbound can work very well as a joint effort.

Three predictions for 2011 based on dozens of conversations I've had with companies at marketing conferences this year:

Prediction: More marketers will purchase marketing automation systems.

Marketing automation is the number one tool for lead management. Sherpa found that 80% of the people they surveyed are implementing marketing automation or are planning to implement in 2011. As sales force automation is a well adopted technology within companies of all sizes, and CRM project managers looking to add valuable information to the Salesforce.com’s of the world, many more companies will go shopping for lead management systems like Eloqua, Marketo and Neolane.

Prediction: The number of failed marketing automation implementations will be higher than ever.

As a direct result of more people buying more technology too soon, 2011 will be the worst year for marketing automation implementations since the industry started 11 years ago. Marketers who want to avoid being roadkill on the highway of business success should start planning well in advance, being sure to have the people and the business processes planned before going shopping for technology.

Prediction: The discipline of marketing will begin a seismic shift that will culminate in a professional certification for marketers.

Lawyers have the Bar. Accountants can become CPAs. Why is it that any Bob or Jane can hang out a shingle and call themselves a marketer? When undisciplined, untrained people enter our profession, it cheapens the word marketer. I believe that the ubiquity of quantitative, measurable marketing will give rise to a new wave of thinking about standardization and certification of marketers by accredited schools and associations.

Here are few thoughts about the road ahead for B2B Marketing in 2011:

1. The idea of "account-based marketing" will gain ground. While MAS does a great job tracking individuals, an account-based view into web activity is vital to building pipeline and understanding where exactly your prospects are in the buying cycle. After all, when is the last time you sold into just one person at a company? What would get you more excited, one person at an account hitting your high-value content or 4 people from that company hitting high value content? Online privacy will continue to be a huge debate, but B2B will remain largely immune. B2B marketers will be forced to consider privacy like their B2C counterparts, but business-identity (account-based) marketing and tracking -- rather than individual behavior -- will become more valuable to B2B than one-to-one relationships.

2. There will be a renewed focus on website conversion optimization. Right now, most B2B websites overwhelm you with options while hoping that you will self-select your way into identifying yourself as a lead. These sites are not optimized for converting visitors to leads, and deep down many B2B companies know this, which leads to website creep -- an overabundance of microsites and stand-alone landing pages. In his blog piece from this past November, The Declining Role of Microsites, Sirius Decisons analyst Jay Gaines defines a microsite as a "dedicated online destination that is deployed to support a specific outbound or inbound marketing initiative." In other words, it is a small, self-contained site dedicated to converting visitors into leads. While they can be extremely effective, they are a classic example of treating the symptom rather than the disease. Gaines states that "excessive use of microsites is increasingly a symptom of a poorly designed, outdated and inflexible primary site..." His recommendation? "...marketers should focus on turning their primary site(s) into conversion optimized destinations..." I couldn't agree more.

3. It's no longer sales vs. marketing, it will become sales vs. operations. Perceptions of marketing's value have improved significantly with the rise of CRM, MAS, web analytics and other marketing technologies. It has become less of an issue due to the broad availability of marketing metrics and measurement tools. Improvement can be measured, and success is more transparent. Unfortunately, the thing that is still muddy is visibility into the sales process once a lead is handed off. While it is easy to point to revenue as the ultimate measure of success, what is getting harder is the ability to easily answer questions like "what is happening with the 10 top leads from that trade show?" Progress is not being recorded accurately in the CRM or SFA tools, and to be honest, the best salespeople I know are usually the absolute worst at recording the steps I am the most interested in tracking. Let's say that your funnel consists of MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads) at the top, followed by Sales Qualified Leads (SQL's), Appointments, Opportunities (pipeline) and then Revenue. With tools like MAS and CRM working together to shine the spotlight on performance at the top of the funnel (and with revenue being so inherently visible) what has become obvious is the black hole of measurement in the middle. Sales operations is going to butt heads with the selling team more and more this year, because while it is easy to say "if it's not in the CRM it doesn't exist" -- actually training a team to work that way in a manner they are comfortable with is a huge challenge.

What are the top B2B lead generation trends to watch for?

1. As Marketing Automation companies continue to promote themselves and organizations such as Oracle and IBM continue their involvement in the space, we should see more B2B firms engage in the technology. Not just for Enterprise IT companies, but also the SMBs that also see the value in drip campaigns and lead nurturing, and the effect on Marketing ROI growth.

2. Google, YouTube, Facebook, Bing, etc. continue to evolve, and marketers need to stay abreast of the changes in search. Just in 2010 we had Google Places and Google Instant. The search algorithms constantly are tweaked. The importance of social media mentions, a la Twitter, certainly affect organic listings. So the trend for 2011 will be the continued integration of search and social media.

3. More companies will be turning their attention to their websites, and learning to make them lead generators. By utilizing landing page optimization tactics, and converting audiences with content, more leads enter the funnel. Content marketing will continue to grow as a line item within marketing budgets.

4. Twitter Advertising. As Twitter continues to roll out and test advertising platforms, companies will test, and test again. Only then can an effectiveness model be determined, but rest assured, Twitter is watching, and so are we.

5. Attribution Modeling. Although much of the marketing decisions made through analytics are focused on "last click" metrics, companies large and small continue to figure out optimal media mixes, and where to give credit. In 2011, we see Google and online advertising companies continue to improve their measurement capabilities with this issue.

Paul Mosenson
President
NuSpark Marketing
www.nusparkmarketing.com

1. B2B Marketing increasingly data driven. Everything from the performance (or non performance) of CRM system data, measurement analytics, predictive analytics etc. All keying off of IBM’s big push into this space.

2. Content creation meets social media. Fast way to create as much content as you need. How easy, yet how powerful could this be? Tactics like “title and link” “bullets and link” and “sub-headings and link” will start adding substance to social marketing plans.

3. Sales 2.0 influences Demand Gen approaches and drives higher productivity. Higher adoption of Sales-enablement systems that link automation and social media, shorten the sales cycle.

The overarching trend: In 2011, B2B lead attraction activities will continue to erode the efficacy of lead generation activities. Therefore, B2B marketers will:

1. Invest more time, effort, and resources into developing deeper insights into what matters most to their best prospects, what information they seek at each stage of the buying process, where prospects turn for information, and in what form they prefer to receive it.

2. Leverage this research to develop compelling value propositions for each stakeholder that influences the buying decision at their best prospects.

3. Engage prospects with stakeholder-specific content that demonstrates, and provides evidence of how their companies deliver on their value propositions. Distribute this content in the form each stakeholder prefers and through the sources they already turn to for information.

4. Bring content development, production, and placement in-house, and decrease dependence on agencies as content is increasingly seen as a core capability that provides a competitive edge and requires full-time attention.

5. Ramp up investments in technology that help them analyze efficacy and deliver more and more relevant/personalized communications to prospects at every stage of the buying process.

2011 will see continued adjustment as B2B lead generators experiment with the opportunities provided by new media.

1. marketing automation hits an inflection point, or maybe two. Mainstream B2B marketers will purchase marketing automation systems in large numbers, having finally heard about it often enough to believe it's worthwhile. But many buyers will be following the herd without understanding why, and as a result will not invest in the training, program development and process change necessary for success. This will eventually lead to a backlash against marketing automation, although that might not happen until after 2011.

2. training and support will be critical success factors. Marketers will increasingly rely on external training, consultants and agencies to help them take advantage of the changes in media and buying patterns. Companies that aggressively seek help in improving their skills will succeed; those who try to discover everything for themselves will fall behind. Marketing automation vendors will move beyond generic industry education to provide one-on-one assistance to their clients via their own staff, partners, and system features that automatically review client work, recommend changes and sometimes implement them automatically. (Current examples: Hubspot's Web site grader for SEO, Omniture Test & Target for landing page optimization, Google AdWords for keyword and copy testing.)

3. integration will be the new mantra. Marketers will struggle to exploit the ever-expanding array of online marketing options. Complexity will lead them to seek a unified dashboard to view and manage all these media. Vendors will scramble to fill this need. Existing marketing and CRM systems will seek to use their existing functions as a base, and entirely new systems will access many different products transparently via their APIs.

4. SMB systems will lead the way. Systems built for small businesses will set the standard for ease of use, integration, automation and feedback. Lessons from these systems will be applied by their developers and observant competitors to larger companies. But enterprise marketers need scalability, content sharing and user rights management that SMBs do not. Selling to enterprises is also very different from selling to SMBs. So the SMB vendors won't necessarily succeed at larger clients.

5. social marketing inches forward. Marketers in 2011 will still be confused about how to best use social media. Better tools will emerge to simplify and integrate social monitoring, response and value measurement. Advanced firms will increasingly see social as one of many channels to be integrated with the rest of their marketing programs. Social extensions to traditional marketing automation systems will make this easier.

6. the content explosion implodes. Marketers will rein in runaway content generation by adopting a more systematic approach to understanding the content needed for different buyers at different stages in the purchase cycle. Content and delivery systems will be mapped against these persona/stage models to simplify delivery of the right content in the right situation. Marketers will develop small, reusable content "bites" they can assemble into custom messages, reducing the need for new content while delivering more appropriate treatments. Marketers will also be increasingly insistent on measuring the impact of their messages. Since this requires result data from external sources, so it will occur outside the delivery systems themselves.

7. last call for last click attribution: marketers will seriously address the need to show the relationship between their efforts and revenue. This will force them to abandon last-click attribution in favor of methods that consider all treatments delivered to each lead. Different vendors and analysts will propose different techniques to do this, but no single standard will emerge before the end of 2011.

In 2011 B2B marketers will:

1. Continue increasing their spending on online marketing activities (content creation, blog, SEO, email marketing and paid search) and will decrease spending on their offline initiatives (direct mail, trade shows and print advertising). Given the changes in how buyer’s research products and services they want to purchase I see this trends continuing in the coming years.

2. Use social media marketing in a more effective way. As social media becomes more mature as marketing tool and more success stories emerge we will start seeing an increase in lead generation initiatives on these various platforms. Social media will also become an excellent tool for customer service and customer retention programs.

3. Mobile marketing will explode. With the emergence of all the new platforms (Apple iPhone and iPad, Googles Android) mobile marketing will move beyond mobile messaging. Mobile email, mobile websites and mobile applications will become a valuable channel for marketers in 2011

4. Concentrate on understanding their prospects behaviours online and offline to gain a deeper insight in their prospect buying cycles. Using these insights marketers will be able to produce higher converting content and marketing programs that will allow them to generate quality leads for their business.

Hi Everybody,

The previous answers seem to have pretty well covered Craig’s request, although there is a new, overall approach to B2B Lead Gen in general that I think may be one of the surprise trends in 2011: progressive, multi-touch lead gen.

Although this type of campaign has barely begun to take hold in the lead nurturing/marketing automation realm – where the concept may be more intuitive – lead gen economics will begin to push it into lead gen as well in 2011. The lift in response from progressive, multi-touch lead gen mirrors the lift in lead nurturing response rates from the same kind of marketing – not in actual rates, but in the ratios of multi-touch response rates to one-time contact response rates.

Adopting this approach with purchased names will require some changes in the list rental industry. However, treating each use of the same name as a rental will create new ways to meet minimum order requirements, and make it more feasible to follow this approach. And for names with multiple use included – whether on hand or purchased – they’re already there.

In pure marketing terms, progressive, multi-touch lead gen plugs directly into the uber-trend of moving from marketing campaigns to conversations. Progressive, multi-touch lead gen conversations will also enhance the familiarity quotient that multiple contacts from the same source reinforce – as opposed to going out to new names every time.

Based on what we’re hearing from our global B2B customers, these are our predictions for the top lead generation trends to watch in 2011:

1. One-to-one personalization made possible: Conversational marketing, the next evolution of marketing, is about building and sustaining one-to-one personalized lifetime dialogues with customers and prospects across all marketing channels to drive revenue and marketing efficiency. However, many B2B marketers continue to struggle to evolve beyond traditional siloed marketing approaches to achieve this true conversational marketing approach that is required today. In the coming year, marketers will focus on adopting more effective, centralized processes for establishing one-to-one personalized dialogues with customers and prospects where communications and experiences are consistent and coordinated – no matter what channel is being used - and not just email and web – but also mobile, social, direct mail, and call center.

2. Inbound/outbound fusion comes to the forefront: Similar to Ardath Albee’s points related to the integration of inbound and outbound content, we agree that we’ll continue to see greater emphasis on fusing inbound and outbound channels for B2B marketers. While integration of inbound and outbound channels can deliver measurable benefits on the top and bottom lines, many companies are still managing inbound and outbound data separately and therefore fail to interact with the target audience in a compelling conversation that increases conversion, sales, and marketing effectiveness. Conversational marketing technology that provides a single platform to fuse both inbound and outbound marketing channels can support the deployment of consistent, effective and measurable strategies that improve demand generation and enable B2B marketers to take control of the customer experience in 2011.

3. Increased adoption of marketing automation technology: To date, adoption of marketing automation technology by B2B marketers has been low, and contributes to the inability of marketers to effectively and efficiently drive conversations across all of the customer touch points. B2B marketers are realizing that by automating their conversations, they can not only drive new leads, but also attribute those leads back to specific marketing activities and budget, providing the much elusive MROI that has long challenged marketers. Neolane believes that in the upcoming year, B2B marketers will adopt marketing automation at an increased pace in order to effectively compete for business and mindshare in today’s fiercely competitive and changing business environment. This includes the ability to more easily manage communication and brand compliance in distributed marketing environments through better marketing asset management and customer engagement.

4. The need for new demand generation model. Left Brain Marketing recently released “The Left Brain Model,” which provides marketers with a framework to granularly measure a B2B marketing organization’s contribution to demand generation programs as well as a structure for the nurturing, progressive profiling and lead scoring activities that support this process. Neolane is supportive of this model as we feel it provides some much-needed best practices for B2B marketers who continue to seek advice for better sales and marketing alignment. This resource can help play a successful role in improving future demand generation processes.

Lots of good answers here and looking forward to a very robust 2011. Here is what I am seeing as some potential trends for the coming year.

1. Demand Generation gets personal - Increased attention to content marketing. The continued shift in the B2B Buyer is making it paramount that organizations develop relevant and timely content that maps to every stage of the buying cycle. Buyers are demanding a 1-1 engagement with vendors and organizations need to understand that in B2B you are still selling to people. This engagement will be done through dynamic and integrated content delivery.

2. Marketing Automation Maturity: While I do agree that we will see an increase in the adoption rate of automation over the next year, I think even more important will be the push to get more value from automation investments. It is estimated that less than 25% of organizations are getting the full value of their automation solution. This will push those who own automation to invest in the areas of content, process and people to ensure the technology can deliver what they need and expect.

3. The Rise of Business Intelligence: B2B marketers will need to get more scientific on marketing and do a better job at analyzing the return on their marketing investment. Using BI to pull together the various customer touch points (sales, finance, marketing, customer service, etc.) will enable a holistic view and allow for a much better overall engagement of the customer.

4. Mobile Marketing: With more virtual business environments and a mobile workforce, organizations will do more to reach the mobile buyer and communicate to them via the device of their choice.

5. More integration: While Forrester estimates that up to 89% of B2B marketers use email as a means of communication, B2B marketers will begin to use online and offline medium to communicate with the buyer. The medium will be dictated by the prospects place in the buying cycle but it will allow more touch points and better engagement.

Carlos Hidalgo
The Annuitas Group
@cahidalgo

I believe the biggest trend will be a greater focus on using technology to generate information from lead generation and prospecting efforts. Many companies are using teams internally or hiring outsourced firms to do prospecting and in 2011, more and more companies will be asking tough questions about those efforts. After all, this is the single greatest human/live dialogue with the market and companies can gain a tremendous amount of strategic knowledge from those calling efforts--well beyond the number of attempts, connects and conversions. Companies cultivating knowledge in this area can better understand:

-top converting markets/targets (by lead source, industry, revenue range, geography and title path)
-scripting and value statements generating the best response
-number of calling attempts needed to generate optimal performance
-personnel having the most success in the process

It's the same analysis applied to digital marketing and sales opportunity management. However, in 2011, the focus will be on the entire funnel, with prospecting and lead generation bridging the gap and sending analysis back to digital marketing and also to CRM--finally providing insight into Total Funnel Management.

Jenny Vance
President, LeadJen
Twitter: @jennyvanceindy

Craig,

A couple more thoughts. In 2011, I believe that a greater focus on building long term customer relationships will be key. Fancy terms like CLV (customer lifetime value) will gain popularity as marketers come to fully understand the value of acquiring and retaining high value customers. Sales should no longer be viewed as individual transactions – each sale is actually the first step in a carefully orchestrated process to convert sales into lifetime customers. In 2011, marketers will invest in opportunities to build relationships. Marketing's role is to acquire and keep (high value) customers.

Mark Burgess
www.bluefocusmarketing.com
Twitter | @mnburgess

2011 - Or, The Rise of P2P:

1. If 2010 was the year of content marketing, 2011 will be the refinement of content usage. The land grab for content was the first step in getting organizations to speak to buyers like people, instead of mindless robots who dispense budget to whichever channel is least likely to get them fired. People like taking risks, so present a compelling use case, show some results and speak to the buyer like a person. Nimble organizations are doing this everyday and they are outpacing their slower moving, traditionally more successful competitors to the point where that success is starting to shift.

2. Good data segmentation will replace traditional calls to action. The dreaded demo form is dead. That game is old. Start giving the demo away in small, easy to digest snippets that relate to a case study or feature page. Track the views in relation to key pages or multiple demo segment views and then treat these as qualification points. If someone reads about the solution, views how the solution looks, reads how it effects those like themselves and then downloads a guide on how to buy off of the pricing page - they buy next.

3. Personas, personas, personas. We will beat that horse again in 2011. If you aren't constantly asking yourself if every piece of content, every webpage, every event, every message you put out is speaking to at least one of your BEST buyer personas - you will get left behind this powerful marketing shift.

Regardless of what happens in 2011, I can say with confidence that these past few years and certainly 2011 are the most interesting in my marketing career. It truly is the wild west out there with great new ideas and technology manifesting themselves everyday. Can you believe it wasn't too long ago that we all sat around and the most interesting thing to talk about was CRM?

Justin Gray | LeadMD
Email: jgray@LeadMD.com | http://LeadMD.com
LinkedIN: http://www.linkedin.com/in/leadmd
Twitter: http://twitter.com/myleadmd

Many good points and trends that I also see for 2011. My list would include:

1. Lean nurturing finally coming of age.
Companies will move beyond elemental drip marketing campaigns and once-size-fits-all tactics to deliver personalized value propositions that segment by buyer types (end-user, influencer, buyer/decision-maker) and buyer stages (awareness, inquiry, consideration and purchase).

2. Companies will balance and integrate their inbound and outbound demand gen programs to optimize the efforts of the marketing and sales teams and maximize reach into their target audience.

3. Marketing Automation will take off as companies realize that it is a competitive necessity to execute demand generation strategies that enable points 1 & 2 above.

4. B2B Companies will finally start figuring out how to integrate Social Media Marketing programs with their inbound and outbound programs to create and grow communities of existing customers with influencers and advocates for the company.

Henry
@hebruce

2011 will be the year when executives will realized that raising quotas does not raise revenues. So they will look at alternatives:

1. More and more marketers will invest in marketing automation from companies such as Eloqua, Marketo and Silverpop as it becomes a must-have.
2. Content marketing will become an imperative. Marketers will need to become vastly more creative as the environment grows more "noisy."
3. Mobile marketing becomes prevalent, as smart phones become ubiquitous.
4. There will be more focus on website and blogs - to make them vastly more compelling to prospective buyers.
5. Business services firms like NuSpark Marketing, AcquireB2B, and Bluebird Strategies (and Find New Customers, http://www.findnewcustomers.com) will grow by leaps and bounds as companies realize they lack all the needs skills and processes in-house.

Would love to hear what others think.
Jeff Ogden, the Fearless Competitor
Find New Customers "Lead Generation Made Simple"
http://www.findnewcustomers.com

Craig

Some excellent comments to your question. My best recommendation is Twitter. This is an outstanding networking tool that can lead to building relationships and generating business leads. Also, fairly soon, Twitter will offer advertising (so-called Promoted Tweets) to the masses. 190 million users although only about 7% of users tweet daily. However, there are a ton of power users who represent an opportunity to generate leads.

Mark Burgess
www.bluefocusmarketing.com
Twitter | @mnburgess